Even with the power of the AMD Athlon X2 and Intel Extreme Edition processors, we still find ourselves hitting a CPU limitation in a lot of our benchmarks. That is, the graphics cards have more performance to give but the processor is letting the team down.

By overclocking the processor we can see what kind of a performance increase we get. When something isn't CPU limited the performance increase isn't all that major but when we do have a CPU bottleneck, every MHz extra we can get can show us an excellent jump in performance.

The Athlon X2 3800+ was increased from 2GHz to 2.2GHz with a slight increase in the front side bus utilizing the stock X2 heatsink fan.

The small overclock gives us a nice bump in score at both resolutions. Normally 3DMark03 doesn't see any major increases from a CPU overclock but here you can clearly see the small overclock has given us an increase.

We see again that 3DMark05 gives us a significant increase with the 10% CPU increase sees almost a 10% performance increase.

3DMark06 sees a significant increase at the lower resolution with the score being a lot closer at the higher resolution.

Doom 3 clearly sees a good increase with the 10% CPU increase showing almost a 10% performance increase at both resolutions.

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